Politics

In the wake of September 11, John Ashcroft’s Justice Department has presided over an unprecedented assault on the civil liberties established in the Bill of Rights. Enacted in haste and, at times, in partial secrecy, the legislation and orders have not been carefully examined, and their implications are only now beginning to surface. Not since the internment of Japanese Americans during the 1940s have we witnessed such abridgment of American rights.

While the loss of liberties has been met with apathy by the press and public alike, the lawyers and analysts in Lost Liberties provide a detailed, comprehensive look at the USA Patriot Act, chronicling the destructive impact of crackdowns on thousands of Americans and revisiting the ugly history of political repression in times of crisis. Featuring original contributions from David Cole, Michael Tomasky, Nancy Chang, Kenneth Roth, and Anthony Romero, Lost Liberties will be a critical text for those who want to know in advance the long-term implications of these drastic measures.

As electrification spread across America in the early twentieth century, private corporations moved quickly to reap unprecedented profits from millions of new paying customers. Blocking their path was the widespread view that electricity was a basic need and that its production should be regulated—if not owned outright—by the public. The electricity companies fought back, buying up newspapers, radio stations, and politicians, and flooding the schools with free, pro-industry schoolbooks. Their actions heralded the advent of corporate public relations, and form a major chapter in the history of the industry.

In an eye-opening investigation, Sharon Beder’s Power Play reveals the decades-long struggle to wrest control of electricity from public hands. Her analysis ranges from the machinations of American political power to grassroots struggles in South Asia aimed at stemming the environmental degradation caused by multinational energy providers. In so doing, she sets the stage for understanding the damage done by deregulation, the roots of the Enron scandal, and the contemporary debacle of electricity supply.

One in five Americans has a mental illness. Nothing to Hide, a stunning tribute to the millions of families for whom mental illness is a part of everyday life, juxtaposes first-person accounts with beautifully reproduced duotone photographs of forty-four families who defy the stigma of mental illness to speak for themselves about their lives, their illnesses, and their struggles to get well.

Each family in the book is portrayed in two ways: Photographs capture the members together and, often, singly or in pairs. Individual statements—usually one from each person in the family—complete the family picture by telling the story from various points of view. The families, different in many ways, have in common an ongoing struggle with illnesses ranging from schizophrenia and bipolar illness to obsessive compulsive disorder and major depression. These open and candid stories show us that the mentally ill and their families have much in common with the rest of us. They can be found in every community of America, and represent the full range of our economic, racial, and ethnic diversity. Only a small percentage of the mentally ill live with caretakers or in treatment centers.

In her foreword, MacArthur Award–winning author and psychologist Kay R. Jamison calculates the enormous costs of stigmatizing the mentally ill. And an introduction by Kenneth Duckworth, medical director for the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, details our current understanding of mental illness. The book concludes with a moving personal essay by Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post journalist David Maraniss.

In the years after World War II, California, always regarded as an experiment for the American future, became an encouraging model for the nation. It was admired and envied for the quality of its education system, its environment, and its progressive social outlook. However, beginning with the passage of the tax-cutting Proposition 13 in 1978, and continuing through a barrage of voter initiatives, the state has pursued a determined course of retrenchment and reaction, sending it tumbling to the bottom of the nation’s”quality of life” ratings.

In Paradise Lost, Peter Schrag examines the relationship between the politics of that retrenchment and the great demographic changes of recent decades. His book makes a powerful case for reinvigorating our traditional structures of representative government against the increasing power of “populism” that is often disdainful of minority rights and interests. It shows that California is still a test for the nation, and a frightening indicator of our society’s readiness to assimilate and serve its new citizens.